The meteorologist Steven DiMartino signed off Twitter at 11 p.m. last Monday, warning his followers that “intense heavy snow is approaching.” After 20 hours of blizzard-tracking for clients who pay him to predict how the weather will affect their travel, families and businesses, he finally took a nap in his chair.

New York City, he thought, was about to get hit hard.

Four hours later, Mr. DiMartino shook himself awake and turned to his MacBook Pro. He stared at the satellite imagery. He refreshed the screen. Then he refreshed it again. There was no denying it: His forecast had been way, way off.

The realization, he said, hit him like “a sucker punch.”

“It’s kind of like you’re alone in the world,” Mr. DiMartino, 35, said of that sobering moment. “It’s kind of like you against nature and nature won.”

Of course, Mr. DiMartino wasn’t alone. He had plenty of company, including Al Roker of NBC’s “Today” show, who had predicted that the New York region would be “devastated” by a blizzard. The meteorologists at the National Weather Service had forecast as late as 10 p.m. last Monday that 20 to 30 inches of snow would fall in the city.

Mark W. Wysocki, New York State’s climatologist, knew exactly what was coming when he clicked on his iPad on Tuesday morning. New York City wouldn’t take a pounding, as had been forecast. But the weathermen would.

“We get shot,” Mr. Wysocki said, anticipating complaints from New Yorkers irritated that their city had been shut down because of ... less than 10 inches of snow? “The messenger gets shot.”

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Snow at Union Square in Manhattan. The storm mostly battered eastern Long Island and much of New England.CreditYana Paskova for The New York Times

As we brace for yet another snowstorm, it feels like the perfect time to consider the meteorologist: the job, the science and our insatiable hunger for certainty.

First, the job. Many of us love to watch TV weather forecasters at work. Who wouldn’t? They summon high-tech satellite imagery and surface maps, analyze swirling clouds and multicolored atlases, and bring us the highs and lows that materialize like magic on our screens. They seem so reassuring, so expert.

But many lack any formal education in meteorology.

The American Meteorological Society, the professional organization in the field, has 1,091 members who work in broadcasting. Of those, about 50 percent have bachelor’s degrees in the atmospheric sciences, said Tom Champoux, a spokesman for the society. Mr. Roker, for instance, has a bachelor’s degree in communications.

Of course, even meteorologists with formal education in the subject sometimes get it wrong. (National Weather Service experts, please take a bow here.)

Which brings us to the issues of science and certainty. Despite newfangled technology and powerful computer models, there is still considerable uncertainty in weather forecasts, a fact that is rarely emphasized or heeded enough.

During the recent non-blizzard, for instance, two computer models offered different forecasts: The European model predicted heavy snow for the city. The American model predicted less. Guess which one most meteorologists went with this time?

This kind of uncertainty can be hard for people to stomach. After all, the success of our meteorologists’ working lives often affects our own.

Our political leaders count on forecasts to help decide whether to shut down schools and subways, bridges and tunnels. And we ordinary folk want our existential questions answered, too: Will we get to work tomorrow? Or will we be trapped with stir-crazy kids for a snow day?

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Long Island Rail Road commuters at Penn Station waiting for their track assignment before the snowstorm intensified on Jan. 26.CreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times

In the 21st century, in this age of technology, shouldn’t we be able to say for sure?

The answer is no.

“The public’s perception is that we are whiz kids,” said Mr. Wysocki, who is also a senior lecturer in meteorology at Cornell University and once worked as a television weatherman. “What they don’t realize is that these tools narrow down the uncertainty; they don’t eliminate the uncertainty.”

“What we have now,” he explained, “is a big disconnect with that public perception and what we can deliver.”

For meteorologists and atmospheric scientists, whose median annual pay stood at $89,260 in 2012, that often means high expectations, high stress and some hefty helpings of criticism from government officials and others, whether they work in television, in government, in academia or in the private sector.

Gary Szatkowski, a National Weather Service forecaster based in Mount Holly, N.J., felt so guilty about the errant predictions in last week’s non-blizzard that he apologized to public officials on social media.

“You made a lot of tough decisions expecting us to get it right, and we didn’t,” Mr. Szatkowski posted on Twitter.

I’m not sure, though, that apologies are what we need. What we need is for meteorologists to be much more open and explicit about the challenges of their jobs and the limitations of their forecasts.

And we need to understand that when it comes to the weather, the only certainty we can count on is some uncertainty.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: A Job Filled With Forecasts That’s Unpredictable by Nature. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe